Texas part of growing drought in U.S. that rivals Dust Bowl years

Boats sit on the dry, cracked bottom in a dry cove at Morse Reservoir in Noblesville, Ind., Monday, July 16, 2012. The reservoir is down nearly 6 feet from normal levels and being lowered 1 foot every five days to provide water for Indianapolis.

Rain has brought relief to parts of drought-stricken Texas, but national conditions are the worst in more than half a century.

The National Climatic Data Center reported Monday that 55 percent of the continental United States was in moderate to extreme drought at the end of June. The percentage is the largest since December 1956, when 58 percent was covered by drought, and it rivals even some years in the Dust Bowl era of the 1930s, experts said.

That's an improvement from 95.7 percent a year ago but no consolation to residents in the hardest-hit areas.

“West Texas is still in a long-term drought, and it looks like there's no end in sight for them,” said John Nielsen-Gammon, state climatologist at Texas A&M University.

“Central Texas, along with most of the state, still is in a severe drought,” he said Monday.

In the rest of the country, drought conditions expanded last month in the West, the Great Plains and the Midwest, fueled by the 14th-warmest and 10th-driest June on record, the NCDC report said.

Topsoil has turned dry while “crops, pastures and rangeland have deteriorated at a rate rarely seen in the last 18 years,” the report said.

In southern Illinois, Kenny Brummer has lost 800 acres of corn that he grows to feed his 400 head of cattle and 30,000 hogs. Now he's scrambling to find hundreds of thousands of bushels of replacement feed.

“Where am I going to get that from? You have concerns about it every morning when you wake up,” said Brummer, who farms near Waltonville. “The drought is bad, but that's just half of the problem on this farm.”

Around a third of the nation's corn crop has been hurt, with some of it so badly damaged that farmers have already cut down their withered plants to feed to cattle. As of Sunday, the U.S. Agriculture Department said, 38 percent of the corn crop was in poor or very poor condition, compared with 30 percent a week earlier.

Monday's report was based on data going back to 1895 called the Palmer Drought Index.

Climatologists have labeled this year's dry spell a “flash drought” because it developed in a matter of months, not over multiple seasons or years.

The drought is similar to those of the 1950s, which weren't as intense as those of the 1930s, said Jake Crouch, a climatologist with the NCDC.

And farming has changed a lot since the Dust Bowl era. Better soil conservation has reduced erosion, and modern hybrids are much more resistant to drought.

But Crouch said it's important to understand that this drought is still unfolding.

“We can't say with certainty how long this might last now. Now that we're going up against the two largest droughts in history, that's something to be wary of,” Crouch said. “The coming months are really going to be the determining factor of how big a drought it ends up being.”

Nielsen-Gammon, an advocate of strong drought management planning, says Texans should prepare for an extended dry spell that could last through 2020, surpassing the severity of the 1950s drought.